Re: Intermediate forms

Dear Cristiano,

You raise a very good point, this kind of intermediate forms are important
to model and it is not restricted to historical linguistics. And it is
indeed something that was discussed in the context of the upcoming Ontolex
Morph module, with regard to representing intermediate stages for
morphophonological transformations (which is what you were referring to
previously). We ultimately decided that it was out of scope for the Morph
module but maybe later this will be dealt with in a separate module devoted
to automata and transformations. For now I think the solution you suggested
originally — to use a user-defined superclass of an ontolex:Form is
perfectly valid. Alternatively, maybe an ontolex:Observable class from the
upcoming FrAC module
<https://ontolex.github.io/frequency-attestation-corpus-information/#observations>
could
be used? It is an abstraction over any ontolex entity that can be observed
(including forms).
It might sound counter intuitive, since these forms are hypothetical, but
if they are observed in any source (e.g. a reconstruction), I think they
*are* Observables.

Best,
Max

On Mon, 25 Nov 2024 at 11:46, Cristiano Longo <
cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org> wrote:

> Thank you Gilles, I'm very convinced that this discussion is not
> restricted to historical lingustics. I identified some peculiarities of
> these intermediate forms which distinguish them from ontolex forms:
>
> - they are not bounded to any lexical entry (or, at least, to one
> belonging to an hypothetical language)
>
> - they must have almost one written representation and
>
> - almost one associated phonetic representation.
>
> CL
> On 25/11/24 10:16, Gilles Sérasset wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Very interesting discussion.
>
> I am not a specialist in any way, hence maybe a naive question, but in
> which way are such hypothetical forms related to lexical entries in
> reconstructed language ?
>
> They may be of different nature, but share the “hypothetical” feature,
> hence are there any similarities that could be used to treat them similarly.
>
> It also remind me of non lexicalized forms in derivational morphology when
> 2 derivations are used to model the derivation process, eg. Verb -> adj ->
> adv where the adjective form is not lexicalized and never attested. In the
> process modelling it is often “computed” and represented (with a star
> prefix).
>
> Maybe these could inspire a similar modelling.
>
> Regards,
>
> Gilles,
>
> On 24 Nov 2024, at 11:46, Cristiano Longo
> <cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org> <cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org>
> wrote:
>
> Dear Fahad Khan, thanks for your observations which deserve careful
> considerations. In the meanwhile,
>
> at first glance, I observe that of course etymologies (in the sense of
> lemonEty) are just hypotheses,
>
> but stating that a lexical expression is a ontolex:Form is an assertion
> with a precise meaning. In other words, etymologies are hypothetical
> derivations grounded on well attested lexical expression in some language.
> Instead, our case is quite different as our intermediate forms are properly
> hypotetical. This is clarified by observing that a source expression (which
> of course is a form) can be turned into the corresponding one in the
> recipient language through more than one derivation.
>
> In the example we have two derivations from patrem to padre:
>
> patrem -> padrem -> padre, and
>
> patrem -> patre -> padre.
>
> For these reason, I think that asserting that "padrem" or "patre" was
> lexical expression of some intermediate language is quite hazardous.
>
> CL
> On 22/11/24 17:22, Fahad Khan wrote:
>
> Dear Cristiano,
> As far as I'm aware an intermediate form is an unattested form that is
> hypothesized by linguists on the basis of (usually well-attested)
> linguistic rules; as such it is usually prefixed with an asterisk (e.g.,
> **patrem*). But the hypothesis *is* that it was used by speakers at a
> certain point in the evolution of a word, and therefore did belong to a
> certain historical stage of a language. In which case, I don't understand
> why you couldn't use Form, or at least create a subclass of Form for
> asterisked forms?
> Cheers
> Fahad
>
> Il giorno mer 20 nov 2024 alle ore 12:49 Cristiano Longo <
> cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org> ha scritto:
>
>> Good morning all. In my last work I faced with strings that, in my
>> opinion, cannot be modelled using ontolex:Form, as they are just
>> "intermediate forms" which does not belong to any language.
>>
>> An example is reported in Figure 2 at
>> https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3809/paper2.pdf. Here the latin word "patrem"
>> changes to an intermediate form "padrem" through lenition, and finally
>> becomes the italian word "padre".
>>
>> However, the notion of intermediate forms was previously introduced in
>> the areas concerning phonology and morfology, as reported in [1].
>>
>> To deal with such intermediate forms I introduced a new superclass of
>> ontolex:Form (i.e., LanguageObject). However, I'm not really sure that
>> this design choice is correct. Of course, intermediate forms are not
>> morphs.
>>
>> I wonder if there are other works where these kind of strings have been
>> modelled in OWL.
>>
>> Any suggestion and hint is wellcome,
>>
>> thanks in advance,
>>
>> CL
>>
>> [1] A. Hurskainen, K. Koskenniemi, T. Pirinen, L. Antonsen, E. Axelson,
>> E. Bick, B. Gaup, S. Hardwick,
>> K. Hiovain, F. Karlsson, K. Lindén, I. Listenmaa, I. Mikkelsen, S.
>> Moshagen, A. Ranta, J. Rueter,
>> D. Swanson, T. Trosterud, L. Wiechetek, Rule-Based Language Technology,
>> 2023.
>>
>>
>>
>